Gadgetory

so I'm John Wells and I'm the head of design styling at morgue 15 years ago to this day Morgan launched the arrow 8 this was a car that repositioned the brand it had an all-new aluminium chassis aluminium bodywork v8 engine and it really separated Morgan away from the classic Morgan and put us into a new marketplace the 15 years on the arrow branders witnessed a lot of changes in a lot of evolution we can prove the chassis and suspension the vehicle's capabilities and performance we've introduced to ku pays and a target up on top of this platform and we've no longer created a soft top open car so 15 years on it was the anniversary of this era way we wanted to look back to our roots and reintroduce a proper British open top cut within the aero platform so we approached this project with quite a holistic view of the whole design you take all the best bits of arrows throughout the years and we tried to create a car that is the most complete and resolved of all the Aero products so we looked at the chassis this has got an all-new chassis underneath we've drastically improves the torsional stiffness we've moved the cantilever suspension which was inboard to the outside with your wishbone suspension which enabled us to combat some of the body roll and create a much more stable car not only at low speeds but a lot of flatter in the corners too we've got new anti-roll bars we have a new limited slip differential on the back of the car too one of the big focuses of this car for me was really emphasizing the fact this is an open top British sports car so the styling itself in the body is meant to really exaggerate that we have some very long shoulder lines which run through the car which is inspired by a lot of sort of 1960s OpenType cars that really did focus on that driver interaction with its environment so these long shoulder lines flow around the occupants they're almost echoing that of a boat deck adding to that sense of escapism as well the interior itself has been drastically reworked what I've tried to do is take away a lot of the leather which is in the car originally we've always used very fine natural leathers and the cars were bathed in them by taking some of this leather out and replacing it with other materials like classic box weave carpet we're actually able to really celebrate the individual materials and the leathers so you have fine leather at every point of contact and then it's framed with it's very classic carpet we've also looked at a lot more wood finishes more than obviously work with wood we do this very well and bringing that into the car in a very aesthetic way as well as a functional way was important for me in terms of the interaction we've looked at different dashboard variants I think it's important well at this point this has got the most elaborate options list of anymore than we've ever created so the dashboard for example could either have a very tactile mechanical interface or you can have a multi touchscreen system which gives you all those modern conveniences inside the car you've also got carbon seats or the traditional sort of foam leather seats again completely transformed in the way this car looks the same is to be said of the hardtop on this vehicle as well what we didn't want to do is consider things like hard tops as an afterthought and we try to provide as many different possible variations of this car in one go so we've considered the styling of the hardtop right from the offset to the way we're selling this car is very much not as a limited run of maybe 300 vehicles but 300 one-off cars everyone will be so different with that extensive options list and the different coupe a variance or open top variants that we anticipate quite an exciting eclectic mix of cars for me every Morgan has a lot of inherent drama especially within the arrows but there is the noise or the length of some of these elaborate lines the way they drive that view down the bonnet and what I wanted to do is bring a lot of drama back into the car with a very dramatic opening panel but it's quite multifunctional that real hood clamshell actually conceals a fuel filler and it seals around the hood line which eliminates unnecessary shut lines so there's only the very various minimum shut lines on the actual as this boot opens up towards the rear and closes again it actually tensions a soft top which is neatly stowed away underneath this is the first morgen ever to have a hood for this stowed away out of sight in in production which isn't quite a big one for us so this car uses the BMW v8 that we've used previously on our products it's a fantastic engine we work really close to your BMW on the development of setup for this engine and we we really love the way it drives and performs so the output is around about 370 brake horsepower with similar sort of performance figures to the previous era in terms of torque delivery and top speed and acceleration however it's important to add that we really looked at the aerodynamics of this vehicle which does improve that on-road stability when you combine this with the improved chassis which is now stiffer and the jewel witchburn suspension on the outside and more refined road-holding I think it will keep a sensation of much more exhilaration especially when that roofs down and you could hear the exhausts and you're much more in contact with your surroundings I think it would be fair to say without getting ahead of ourselves we enter production autumn this is probably the sharpest festive handling era we've built to date you